General Purpose (SSD) Storage for Amazon RDS

In June of this year I introduced you to the new SSD-backed Elastic Block Storage option for EC2. Just a few months after release, this new option (formally known as General Purpose (SSD)) is already being used for about 90% of the newly created EBS volumes. Our customers have told us that they love the consistent baseline performance (3 IOPS per GB of provisioned storage) and the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS without regard to the amount of provisioned storage.

Today we are bringing the same consistent baseline performance and bursting capability to Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). As an RDS user, you now have your choice of three different types of storage:

• General Purpose (SSD) storage is suitable for a wide variety of database workloads that have moderate I/O requirements. The baseline of 3 IOPS per GB and the ability to burst up to 3,000 IOPS will provide you with predictable performance well-suited to many applications.
• Provisioned IOPS (SSD) storage is ideal for the most demanding database workloads, including OLTP. This storage provides the most consistent performance and allows you to provision between 1,000 and 30,000 IOPS as required by your application.
• Magnetic Storage (formerly known as RDS Standard storage) is a good match for small database workloads where data is accessed infrequently.

You can use the new General Purpose (SSD) storage in conjunction with other powerful RDS features such as Multi-AZ, Read Replicas, and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Pricing for this new option starts at $0.115 per GB per month in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. As usual, full pricing information can be found on the RDS Pricing page.

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This new storage option is available in all AWS Regions and can be used with the MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server database engines.

— Jeff;